“Because I have the money,” Theo said.
The room went so quiet Theo could hear the dehumidifier ticking in the corner.
“What?” Shane said.
“How much is it.”
“Why would I tell you that?”
Shane was still holding the shirt. His chest was rising and falling too fast, shallow pulls of air; he was doing the calculus Theo had already done and arriving at the same number and not knowing what to do with it, and the not-knowing was right there in the open air between them. Theo held the eye contact and did not look away, because looking away would make this smaller than it was, and it was not small.
“Because I have it,” Theo said. Flat. The repetition was deliberate, a line change diagrammed until someone stopped arguing with it. “The treatment. All of it. I have it. And I will pay it. All of it. Now. Up front.”
Shane laughed. It was an awful laugh, high and disbelieving. “Okay. I’ll bite. Out of the goodness of your little Swedishheart, you’ll pay for my mom’s two-hundred-thousand-dollar treatment, the guy you hate, you’ll just—”
“Two hundred?” Theo said. “Or more?”
Shane’s face went complicated. “Two-twenty,” he said, each digit dragged out of him. “With the first year of monitoring. Two hundred and twenty thousand. There is no version of my life where I—”
“I will pay it,” Theo said. “All of it. In exchange for one thing.”
“There it is.”
Theo held the silence for one more second. He had rehearsed saying it without inflection, and he would succeed, and the lack of inflection would cost him nothing because he did not traffic in inflection. Shane’s eyes were on him, furious and frightened and, underneath both, desperate in a way that had no pride left in it. His mother. Mid-stage. Not slowing down.
“Marry me,” Theo said.
The dehumidifier ticked. The fluorescents buzzed. Shane did not move.
He had rehearsed saying it without inflection, and he succeeded, and the lack of inflection was so total that Shane stared at him for a full three seconds as though waiting for the rest of the sentence, the part that would make it a joke.
“My visa lapses at the end of the season,” Theo said into the staring. “The athlete visa. It is tied to my contract. When the contract ends, the visa ends — the contract is the visa, my lawyer says, one ceases and the other ceases with it, and another AHL deal does not renew what has already lapsed. It would have to start again from scratch, and the timeline is not in my favor.” He let that sit. “Marriage to a citizen is the fastest path that does not depend on a coach or a GM or someone in Chicago who does not care about me.” He let that sit too. “You are a citizen. You need two hundred and twenty thousand dollars. I need a spouse. I am offering a transaction. The money for the marriage. We marry,on paper, we do the immigration process, we live as roommates so it survives an interview. At the end, when I have status, we divorce. You keep the money. Your mother gets her treatment. I get to stay.”
Shane had stopped laughing. He’d gone pale and then a strange flat calm had come over him, the calm Theo recognized from the bench after a bad goal, the second before a man decided whether to fold or dig in. And Theo understood it, distantly, as the face of someone being offered what he needed by exactly the person he least wanted to need it from.
“No,” Shane said.
“Okay,” Theo said.
“You understand what you’re saying? You’re saying you’ll buy my mom’s life. You’re saying I should sell, marry — for money. That’s a thing people go to prison for.”
“People go to prison for fake marriages they cannot prove. We will not fake it. We will be married. We will live together. We will be — " Theo searched for the word. “Convincing. Because we will not be lying about the marriage. Only about the reason.”
“I hate you,” Shane said.
“I know.”
“I genuinely — you’re the most insufferable human being I have ever had to stand next to, and I’ve stood next to a lot of—”
“I know.”
“And you want me to wear a ring and share an apartment and lie to the government—”
“And your mother gets her treatment,” Theo said. “This week. The money is real. I can show you the account.”
That stopped him. Theo watched it stop him. Watched the no. The proud, immediate, healthy no, the no of a man who provided and did not get provided for, who would rather break than be carried. Watched it start to rot from the inside, because under the no was his mother, and against his mother the no didnot stand a chance, and they both knew it. Shane knew it. Theo knew it. The knowing sat between them, solid and unignored, and Theo did not look away from it, and neither did Shane.
“I need to think,” Shane said.
